STS-135

The end of the space shuttle program is a bittersweet chapter in America’s space exploration program, but it’s not the end of it, and that’s exciting. Who among us can forget staying up all night to watch Neil Armstrong step off the LEM? Man will take another giant leap – on Mars, if not an asteroid first. You and I may not live to see that day, but our progeny will. Meanwhile, NASA is scheduled to launch a bigger and better Mars rover by year’s end to learn more about our sister planet.

Other spectacular unmanned missions continue. The incredible Hubble Space Telescope has sent back some of the most awe-inspiring photographs of all time since its 1990 launch. And the HST just found a fourth moon orbiting Pluto three billion miles away.

Another telescope -- Chandra, launched and shuttle-deployed twelve years ago -- looks billions of light years into the history of our universe using its X-ray vision (literally) to unveil never-before-seen wonders in that part of the spectrum invisible to us humans.

A NASA probe named Dawn just entered orbit about Vesta, the 3rd largest body in the Asteroid Belt. So what? Vesta may not be an asteroid. It’s huge (330 miles in diameter) and not just a rock like other, much smaller asteroids. It has a crust, a mantle and a core, like Earth and the other interior planets. It could be one of Earth’s cousins. Five percent of the meteorites that fall to Earth come from Vesta.

These are but a fraction of the projects still underway to help explore the eternal question that Ellie Arroway posited in that movie: Why are we here?

Because God put us here? Absolutely. With an insatiable curiosity.

When Police Say

"Attribution! Attribution! Attribution!" The words of Prof. Phil Bremen have rung in the ears of his Ball State University students for years. If your news story is based upon information from a source -- named or unnamed -- you must attribute the information to that source.

This may explain why you'll often hear a newscaster say something like, "A man is jailed after police say..."

Wait. A man was jailed because a policeman spoke?

"Well," a consultant might argue, "that's better than, 'According to police.' That's old-fashioned newspaper speak, and we don't want to sound old-fashioned ..."

Uh-huh.

Listeners (and viewers) don't have the benefit of seeing the puncuation in the script. Maybe the guy/gal wrote, "A man is jailed after, police say, ..." I'm willing to give 100:1 odds that s/he did not include the offsetting commas in the script because (1) s/he grew up hearing "..after police say" and assumed that it was correct because radio and TV newscasters are supposed to be expert grammarians and set an example, or (2) because s/he didn't comprehend the ambiguity, or (3) was never taught the difference.

Sometimes, newscasters will use voice inflection to infer puncutation -- e.g., dropping the pitch of his/her voice at the end of a sentence to indicate a period, or inserting a slight pause before and after reading a direct quote.

So I guess that, to avoid unwarranted arrest, we should all try not to be around when police say.

THE END

The California preacher who got so much attention with his Judgment Day prediction last month says he has recalculated, and that it will happen this Fall. I forget the date. We’ll see. But as his May deadline approached, I got to thinking.

Twenty or thirty years ago, I would have dismissed the man as just another wacko and not given him a second thought. But that was before I lost my father to a rare, fast-moving disease. And my mother to old age. My best friend in high school -- the healthiest, fittest man I knew -- died of a heart attack at age 50. A brother-in-law dropped dead in his 40s, and a colleague died just last month. All, within the last ten years.

While I ignored the preacher's prediction (What can one do, after all?), it reminded me that we are all on this Earth for only a while -- a relatively long while for some, a short while for others. But still just tiny, nearly imperceptible fractions of a second in the galactic clock.

There’s so much yet to do in this life – not the least of which is to appreciate this priceless gift, and the Lord who gave it to us. The economy may be in the tank and so on and so on, but that’s our doing. After all, we are the life-forms in charge.

It’s easy, amid our many woes, to forget that it is a miracle that we are here at all. Whether you view life and this planet from a religious or astrophysical position, our existence is truly a miracle.

So whenever The End comes, I’ll be ready. I’m just not holding my breath.

The Alligator

Last February, my little Honda and I took a brief spin through the snow and down into a ditch. Last month, driving very late at night, I hit the biggest alligator that I’ve ever seen. An alligator is what truckers call a piece of tire shed on the highway. I was told years ago that the term originated from the real alligators encountered on Florida highways. Highway alligators are usually retreads off 18-wheelers, and most often they fly apart on the road, normally in pieces no bigger than 2 or 3 feet.

This one was a monster. It must have been the whole tire. It had peeled off in a single strip, coiled up and twisted, lying there sideways across the entire lane of the Indian Nation Turnpike, about an hour this side of Tulsa. It was one o’clock in the morning, pitch black outside. I was engrossed in some radio show far away.

Suddenly, there it was in my headlights, dead ahead. In those first fractions of a second, I thought it might be a deer. Or even a human being. Maybe a dead cow. While I was trying to figure out what it was, part of my brain said, “Swerve!!” The other part said, “You don't time! Hit it straight on!!”

I hit it straight on. The built-in recorder in my brain went into slow-motion. First, a sickening crunch, then about 2 or 3 Gs of downforce, the car is launched about 2 feet off the ground, and I’m thinking, ”Aw, ****!!" But the car lands perfectly straight. Not a moment of lost control, unless you count the time in the air. Four of the five senses, already at DefCon One, listen and smell and watch and feel how the car is driving. I detect a tiny rumble in the front end, but drive on for 20 minutes ‘til a state trooper gets me doing 83 in a 75. I told him about the monster alligator. “Someone could get killed,” I said. He left to check it out.

I was happy that the car was undamaged. Only later did I see the impact scar on the front bumper, and notice that some piece of thin metal was rattling under the car, the transmission was shifting oddly and the air conditioner was blowing hot.

Three thousand dollars later, the Moral:

Live alligators bite; highway alligators bite your wallet.

FEWER LESSES

Being a grammar freak has its good points and its bad points. Good is appreciating the talent and skill it takes to write well. Bad is reading (or hearing) bad grammar.

What has my dander up these days is the misuse of "less." I hear it everywhere:

"Less dollars!"

It's like fingernails on a blackboard, and it seems to have grown exponentially in the past decade.

Even "The New York Times" blogged about it last month.

Being a simple man, I see two possible explanations for the problem: either teachers are not teaching the difference between "less" and "fewer," or students are not learning it.

The former is unlikely; the latter is very likely.

"Fewer," the rule says, "applies to things that are countable."

Therefore, it's fewer dollars and less money.

Fewer gallons. Less water.

So, please -- fewer lesses!

I feel better now...

Ask Not

We are running out of time, and soon it will be too late. Al Gore’s ecological “tipping point” has an evil twin in Finance, and he is at our door. The U.S. must reduce its debt. Not think about it, just do it. I’m talking about virtually nuking the way we have lived and starting over.

We are in this mess because previous congresses and presidents lacked the political will to solve the problems. Doing so would have cost them re-election, most likely, but they would have served their country in the spirit they so earnestly proclaimed in their election campaigns. Democrats and Republicans share this responsibility equally. More importantly, so do we because we allowed it. It is we who must lead now, not our politicians.

There is only one approach that offers a realistic chance of getting the nation out of its fiscal quagmire: a war. A real, no-holds-barred, financially bloody, scorched-earth war against the political, economic and social sloth that has led us here. Here’s a possible war plan:

First, the children. Stop raising them “easy.” Don’t buy them everything they want. Make them earn it. Better still, make them save up for it. Don’t let them play more than one sport at a time. Make them learn music. Teach charity. Remove the TV from their bedrooms. Restrict their computers and cellphones. Make them read a book a week and write letters to their grandparents or cousins. Give them chores. Take them to church. Teach them how to cook, fight, shoot and ride. Teach them humility and manners. Be tough. Be loving. Be a parent.

Second, you. Lead by example. You and your kids save up for their college or they don’t go unless they win a scholarship. Want a new car? Buy it outright or keep and maintain the one you have. To hell with what your co-workers and the neighbors think. If they ask what’s up, explain that you’re a soldier at war to save our country, then recruit them.

Third, Washington. Outlaw lobbyists. End foreign aid. Make banks be banks and nothing more. Take the exotic out of Wall Street: stocks, bonds and commodities only. Give cheaters and frauds long, long jail time.

Fourth, the tax code. Nuke it and go to a flat tax. No write-offs, no deferreds, no loopholes, no exceptions.

Do at least these things – constitutional amendments as needed -- and maybe we can get our country back.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do to save it.

The Gift

As a young man, I enjoyed a nearly perfect sense of direction. Rain or shine, winter or summer, I could tell within ten degrees on a compass which direction I was facing. Not everyone my age had this gift. Its display was even met with envy at times. I wasn’t much good at anything else, so it was nice to be good at something.

The gods, however, award such gifts grudgingly. My internal compass began to fade in my 30s, and has long since shut down entirely. Built-in obsolescence, I suppose.

Without that factory-installed compass, I am lost. This is wholly unfair. Mature men need it more than young men, for the young are much more adept at faking it.

My wife has watched this erosion (and happily complained about it) for years. It used to be that I knew which way to turn and she didn’t. This was immensely satisfying. Men, you see, must be acutely aware of their surroundings at all times so as to pounce on any approaching threat.

Naturally, the angst of the missus grew inversely proportionate to my fading sense of direction. The worse it got, the more she dutifully pointed it out. Thanks, babe.

For awhile, I could blame cloudy skies or nighttime for obscuring the sun by which I navigated. That argument survived for about three days.

At length, one of my sons – acutely aware of the crisis – bought me one of those GPS things. Voila! I installed it at once, carefully licking the suction cup on the windshield mount and planting it, just so. It had a for-real compass built in! Screw the cloudy skies! Screw the dark of night! Problem solved!

The gods must have been amused by this. For sport, they inflicted near-record heat on Texas summers. The defenseless GPS began falling off the windshield, clanging right onto the steering column and scaring the crap out of me and the missus.

There are some things one absolutely should not attempt while driving, such as grabbing one’s crotch to protect the boys from incoming.

Only slightly less dangerous is driving while attempting to affix a GPS mount to the inside of a windshield. While steering with both knees to keep the hands free for the task. And at night. And (naturally), while trying to remember directions to an unfamiliar address which you expected to find easily because you had this GPS but which from this moment forward stands not for Global Position System but instead for ***-damned Piece of ****.

I wonder what we did with that old street map . . .